Log table with millions of rows. Now, what?

I have a Log table with millions of rows. I'm thinking about separating the data into multi开发者_如何学Gople tables (i.e. LoginHistory, ExceptionHistroy, PaymentProcessingHistory, etc.) What is the term used when taking a large table with many rows (not Columns) and creating multiple tables?

My current Log table schema resembles: LogID, LogMessage, LogReason, LoggedBy, LoggedOn, etc.

The problem is I'm putting too many things in one table, I think? Perhaps the table is too generic?

Thanks

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It is called data partitioning.

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Sharding is the term de jour. From the link:

Horizontal partitioning is a database design principle whereby rows of a database table are held separately, rather than splitting by columns (as for normalization). Each partition forms part of a shard, which may in turn be located on a separate database server or physical location.

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I think you should be looking at horizontal partitioning. Horizontal partitioning is more or less a subset of sharding.

For more details on horizontal partitioning, here's the wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_%28database%29

You didn't mention which DB technology you use, but here are some technical links that can get you going with partitioning your data:

IBM DB2 partitioning
MySQL partitioning
Oracle partitioning
SQL Server partitions
PostgreSQL partitioning
Sybase ASE 15.0 partitioning